Year’s End

Answering impossible questions

1. I felt the most joy, the most carefree with the people I know and love who also know and love me. Carefree when out of doors alone, joy with others around a shared table. Cooking together. Caring for one another. Laughing. Making art. Watching old movies. Even arguing. About important things. Crying. Lamenting together.

2. It gave me renewed energy to spend energy doing what I love doing. Walking alone, or with my love and our dog. Peering over into canyons lit by a setting sun. Talking with others; people I know, even strangers. Exchanging energies. Meetings and also meeting up. Spending energy together; refueling alone. Writing in a notebook. Watching TV during the day. Hot baths. Naps. Nights of deep sleep.

3. It drains me to explain myself. To anyone. It drains me when chaos drives the conversation; when I’m expected to give more than I am given. It drains me to keep doing hopeless activities over and over again expecting different results. I can feel the blood drain from my brain when I read in another face that they don’t get me. They don’t understand what I’m saying. It’s a drag to be a drag. A drag to keep trying to make myself understood.

4. It seemed impossible to pack up and leave forever the home where I’d lived the longest. To move from the house, and the city, where I’d lived for half my life. A once exciting life changing destination. It seemed impossible to move on. But I did. I did it anyway. My husband and I packed up and moved to another city, a city further south, a place where I’d lived as a small child, where family chaos, violence in the night had set my mother and sister and brother and I rambling. It seemed impossible that I could live anywhere near that primal place again. My sister long dead. In a place where my brother slept rough. In a park. It seemed impossible that I could live near there and be okay myself. But I did. I began to live there, had lived there a year before I received a call that my brother had died. In that park. Where he lived off and on. Under a wide cloudless sky, amidst shrubs, in the underbrush, near a river, surrounded by tall grasses, along dirt paths lined with rosemary, near a playground, in a public park where he died. It seemed impossible I would answer a phone to hear a woman named Bianca tell me that my baby brother was gone yet not lost. Found in a bush in a park. Dead and gone. It seemed impossible to see him inanimate. The boy who played eagle in the front yard, twirling wild and free. Always on the move. It seemed impossible to say good-bye to him in a room within a mortuary in the town, in a place not far from where he was born. Where we’d lived together once upon a time with a mother and a father in a house on a corner in a neighborhood where icicle plants grew in front yards and my brother dance like a warrior while I rode my big blue bike. It seemed impossible that his story was over while mine still continued. Impossible to say good-bye. But I did.

5. If I exercised more, slept longer, looked more on that proverbial bright side, believed in focusing on the ever-elusive positive side of life I might be happier. So, some say. More lighthearted. Carefree. Even if I don’t want to be always flipping happy, forcing a smile, soldiering on away from a too difficult reality. I don’t care to be free of reality. I want to sink into the real while I am able. Live in the difficulty of life interdependent and amidst all I love and all I’ve lost. My living family, my dying siblings, my broken hopes, my mysterious body. An aging face which I often don’t recognize; eyes down in there still dark and curious looking out on all I can’t control, can’t change. So much light and also darkness. Ruin. Loss. And yes, new life. Growth.

6. So much is unforgivable. Not only over there but also right here within us, within me. The place where forgiveness begins and ends. Within and without. Always and forever.

Steve Edwards

May 6 1958 - November 23 2025